Spring

Again I hiked alone in the Chugach mountains along Turnagain Arm, climbing the same mountain today as I climbed one week ago.  But, how different it was! A week's time can change so much in nature, and so little out of it.

Henry Thoreau spoke of the honking of Canada geese as one of the archetypal sounds of his Walden woods.  I can see him stopping, during one of his walks, to look up through the canopy of mostly bare spring or autumn trees at the groups of passing geese, their anxious, clownish calls halting his thoughts. 

Beyond the summit today I had continued along the high ridge another mile, farther than I had walked before, on large drifts of snow, until I reached a small rocky overhang where a swift and sailing rock ptarmigan had earlier made his descent.  There I lunched, enjoying the warm sun and pleasant absence of wind.  

On my return to the summit, I heard Thoreau's goose, distant but ringing, far above and far to the south, above adjacent higher peaks.  There in the bright sky a dark and thin line approached, rising and undulating until it passed above me.  The flock of seventy geese, the first of the season in this area of Alaska, shone brightly as they migrated over the range of alpine ice and rock, nearly one mile high, yet much closer to me, to their breeding grounds.

This was my day's elation.  The previous week, it had been the discovery of the diminutive golden-crowned kinglet, reaching four inches from bill to end of tail, high amongst the distal branches of a tall white spruce, busily conducting his business.  I had patiently waited, binoculars at hand, until I caught a glimpse of this new bird who had called as I passed, a call that I could not ascribe to any bird in my mind's catalog.  Returning to this area of spruce and birch, today I flushed one of my favorite friends, the spruce grouse, from the base of a large and healthy tree. Spreading the lower boughs, I peered into his dark canopy home after he had departed, orange-tipped tail fanning as he soared swiftly into a secluded recess, and found his humble quarters to be quite suitable indeed.   

It would be a good week for a spring grouse, tired of sustaining himself on nothing but spruce tips for the duration of Alaska's long winter, to be out.  New to the woods this week, and to the upland shrubs above them, were butterflies, brown, orange, and yellow, another first of spring.  

At home, I learned that this was the Milbert's tortoiseshell, a hardy creature that hibernates in the snow through the winter until the  sun stirs it back to life.

Hiking Alone

I hiked alone in Chugach State Park two days ago, up and along a coastal mountainous rib known as Bird Ridge, on an early Spring day that followed a few weeks of warm weather.  The winter had been mild and dryish and was over, and I went to shake off the infestations of my primary environment, a city dense with people, and its unceasing demands of me.  I also went to see if I could find some interesting birds.

I wore a new lightweight shell, and as the wind whipped and roared along the cliffs and lower hills near the coast, and as light, ephemeral rains fell, I climbed gently, warm and dry.  This trail was an old acquaintance, I having hiked it some dozen times over seven years, and I knew it well enough to not feel lonely, despite the morose weather.  Small, thin clouds, wispy collections of fog, moved hurriedly down the coast, bunching together and coalescing as they rolled up a slope, and then splayed over a peak would encounter a wide space and dissipate.  Underneath my feet, the snow and ice had melted and there was wet earth and rock.  My route took me east and up the southern face of a large hill, and the spruce and poplar forest, where I had once found a moose and her calf, and another time a young goshawk, then began to thin.


How peculiar and familiar is the happiness one feels, alone in the woods, on the mountain's side, indeed! How free one knows himself to be, in that moment at least, when the straight lines and right edges of the manufactured environment are not around him, not walling him, corralling him, leading him, penning and pinning him! How awake one does become when he drinks air agitated and fortified so by its rough course over coast and cliff and woods! When his purpose is only to breathe deeply and follow a meandering foot path, how content one is! 

In the upland of these mountains, thick grasses and thickets of alder and willow carpet the earth, and it is here that I see the willow ptarmigan in my mind.  There, in a small clearing in the thicket, recessed in a shadow, sits silent and motionless the sentinel cock, betrayed to me only by his red eye comb and his heavy grouse form, painted white and auburn, perched above snow and amidst bark.


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